Translation

The transfer of knowledge and culture in Europe – particularly since the emergence of national languages as the languages of literature and scholarship – is inconceivable without translations and the activity of translators. This concerns all aspects of society and culture. The spread of printing technology throughout Europe at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century did not only lead to a rapid increase in the number of translations but also paved the way for the Reformation movement, which played a vital part in shaping European society right up to the present day. For centuries the age-old dichotomy of word vs. sense has dominated the history of translation – eventually leading to the independent discipline of Translation Studies.

Introduction

Any attempt to write an adequate history of translation, even one limited to Europe within a restricted period of time, would be a utopian undertaking. While translation permeates every historical epoch and countless aspects of human activity, the translator's task and its significance vary with the many different language communities across the world and the diverse political constellations arising during the course of history. The work of the translator is dependent on power structures dominant at the time, on frequently unpredictable economic and cultural developments, and even the changing concept of translation itself1 which determines the relationship between source and target text as regards both form and content.2 The history of translation cannot be represented as a chronological report, as a stable continuum, nor can it be recorded as a mere inventory of texts, but can only be seen from the perspective of the times and the individual text concerned. This article will present an overview of the main trends in translation between 1450 and 1950, concentrating on the peak periods and highlights along with the outstanding personalities who have created them, from the viewpoint of today's "interdiscipline" of Translation Studies,3 particularly in relation to the history of Europe and its cultural and intellectual development.

Prologue: Classical Antiquity and the "School of Toledo"

Translation is one of the oldest activities of humankind, going back to the invention of writing systems and hence written communication across language barriers.4 An early pioneer achievement of translation in Europe can be found in Classical Antiquity, when a former Greek slave called Livius Andronicus (ca. 285–204 BC) made a Latin version of the Odyssey of Homer (ca. 8th century BC), thus giving the Romans access to the treasures of Greek literature.5 In the Roman Empire, translation began to flourish. Some of the translators were themselves poets, such as Horace (65–8 BC) and Virgil (70–19 BC), or other outstanding personalities, in particular Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC). It was he who formulated one of the earliest maxims of translation theory: In his discussion of translation De optimo genere oratorum,he ranks translating according to sense higher than a word-for-word rendering ("Non ut interpres (…) sed ut orator"6), unleashing a discussion that was to dominate translation theory for nearly two thousand years. This approach emerges especially clearly in the work of Eusebius Sophronicus Hieronymus (345–420)[], the patron saint of translators and the author of the Vulgate. In a letter (No. 57) to the Roman senator Pammachius, he freely admitted his strategy of expressing not one word by means of another, but translating sense for sense ("non verbum de verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu"), with the exception however of the Holy Scriptures, where "even the word order is a mystery".7 In later centuries, an attitude such as this, especially in the field of Bible translation, was to prove disastrous for many a translator in Europe.

During the 9th and 10th centuries a constellation of a completely different kind emerged in Baghdad in the form of a translation chamber under the direction of the Christian physician and scholar Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), known in the West as Johannitius.8 Here scholars worked in teams to translate scientific works from ancient Greek into Arabica. In the 12th century, these texts were themselves translated into Latin by scholars in the Spanish city of Toledo, the main focus being on the philosophical and scientific achievements of the Greek and Arab world, especially in the fields of medicine, mathematics, astronomy and astrology.9 In the 13th century, translations were then made from Arabic into the Spanish vernacular. Through the constant exchange of ideas and experiences these translators were able to create a treasure trove of knowledge which was to enrich Western culture across language barriers. The "School of Toledo" stands for a peak period of translation in Spain and for cultural and scientific interaction in the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe.10

After 1450: Renaissance, Reformation and the "Sacred Word"

The transition from the Middle Ages to modern times was marked by a decisive event that was also to revolutionize translation: the invention of printing with movable type in the mid-15th century by the German printer Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1397–1468) from Mainz. In medieval times it had been the privilege of scholars to write down and discuss the results of their scholarship, but in the Age of the Renaissance with all its new ideas and discoveries and the revival of interest in Classical Antiquity, such knowledge was made accessible to all those who were able to read. Texts were not only in Latin as the lingua franca of the elite, but increasing use was made of the vernaculars. Thus arose a new golden age of translation, which on the European continent had its origins in Italy.11

In his translations Wyle, whose main work appeared in 1478 with the title Translatzen oder Tütschungen, aimed at reproducing Latin stylistic features as exactly as possible, thus following the humanistic ideal of "love of the sweetness and beauty of words".13 This meant that his translations could only be understood by "readers instructed and educated in Latin".14 Steinhöwel, on the other hand, was mainly interested in rendering the sense of the text for a broad German-speaking readership, and he had no reservations about "enriching" the text by adding proverbs, rhymes, popular turns of phrase or allusions to current events.15 His most successful translations were firstly the tale Griseldis from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) in the Latin adaptation of Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) – a "Schlüssel-Publikation des süddeutschen Frühhumanismus"16 – and secondly his German-Latin edition of Aesop's fables.17 Eyb also concentrated more on content than on form. In the Preface to his Spiegel der Sitten he comes out in favour of Jerome's translation strategy when he writes:

The rulers of the time soon realized that the Church's monopoly of knowledge was jeopardized by printing and translation, and they tried to control this by censorship. One of the first of these edicts was issued on 22nd March 1485 by the Archbishop of Mainz Berthold von Henneberg (1441–1504), who described his views on translations from Greek and Latin into German as follows:

In France it was Jacques Amyot (1513–1593) who was to have a great influence on the emergence of the French national language, especially with his Vies des hommes illustres, an idiomatic and meticulously annotated French version of the biographies of outstanding personalities of Classical Antiquity by Plutarch (ca. 45–120).23 Translation also prospered in England under Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), herself an enthusiastic translator, e.g. of works by Boethius (480–524), Horace and Euripides (480–406 BC).24 The texts translated at this time were above all non-literary and pragmatic, on subjects such as health, education and warfare.25 Translation, on the one hand, served as a means of instruction for the up-and-coming middle classes,26 and, on the other, to enrich the English language which was thought to be backward at the time: It is even claimed that translation made a considerable contribution to the development of a national identity.27 The classic example is Plutarch's Lives by Thomas North (1535–1601), which was based on Amyot's French version and was likewise intended to familiarize a broad readership with the political, social and cultural peculiarities of the then highly revered society of Classical Antiquity.28 Among the works based on Plutarch's Lives were the Roman dramas of William Shakespeare (1564–1616)[]. This is only one example of the linguistic and cultural exchange of this age, which has been summarized as follows:

At a time of explosive innovation, and amid a real threat of surfeit and disorder, translation absorbed, shaped, oriented the necessary raw material. It was, in a full sense of the term, the matière première of the imagination. Moreover, it established a logic of relation between past and present, and between different tongues and traditions which were splitting apart under stress of nationalism and religious conflict.29

A symbolic figure of humanist translators was the Frenchman Étienne Dolet, who not only introduced the terms traduction and traducteur into the French language, but was the first person to present a brief (4-page) treatise on translation theory: La manière de bien traduire d'une language en l'autre, which he printed and published himself in 1540 – and in which he rejects word-for-word translation.32 Dolet, who had studied in Paris and Padua, where he also worked as secretary to the Bishop of Limoges, the French ambassador to the Republic of Venice, was best known for his translations from Ancient Greek. His rejection of word-for-word translation finally cost him his life: Because of a few words added in his French translation of one of Plato's Dialogues, he was sentenced to death by the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne. Through the words "rien du tout" ("nothing at all") with reference to life after death, which in the opinion of the court were not recognizable in the original, he supposedly questioned the immortality of the soul and was therefore a heretica. On the 3rd August 1546, he was tortured and burned at the stake on the Place Maubert in Paris – and with him were burned his translations and editions.33

However, in those days Étienne Dolet was by no means alone in his fate:

The translation battle raged throughout Dolet's age. The Reformation, after all, was primarily a dispute between translators. Translation became an affair of State and a matter of Religion. The Sorbonne and the king were equally concerned with it. Poets and prose writers debated the matter, Joachim du Bellay's Défense et illustration de la Langue française34 is organized around problems relating to translation.35

The same applied to other countries in Europe, and in the view of many historians translations played a decisive part in the development and impact of the Reformation.36 Of central importance was the translation of the Bible and the faithfulness to the "sacred word" of God. Particularly tragic was the fate of the English Bible translator William Tyndale (1494–1536). After his translations had been banned in England, he was forced to flee to the European Continent (his English version of the New Testament was published in Cologne and Worms). He was eventually arrested in Antwerp, tortured and burned at the stake.37 Only much later did his significance and that of his works gain recognition, and nowadays he is not only known as the "father of the English Bible",38 but even as the "patriarch of English language and literature".39 He, too, did not translate into the written language of the learned, but into the spoken language of the people and thus made an invaluable contribution to the development and enrichment of the English language. His influence is even noticeable in the King James Bible of 1611, also known as the "Authorized Version": it is said that up to eighty per cent of this monumental work, renowned for its superb poetic language and for nearly four hundred years the standard Bible of the English-speaking world, go back to the work of William Tyndale. 40

The founder and main figure of the Reformation was undoubtedly Martin Luther (1483–1546), who was to share the problems of his contemporary translators. His life, his work as translator of the Bible (his September Testament was the first direct translation from the original languages Greek and Hebrew into a modern language)41 and his importance for the development of the German standard language are so well-known that they need not be described in detail here. Luther's parallels to Tyndale in this regard are however so striking that we must briefly mention his writings, particularly the words he addressed to the conservative ecclesiastics of the time, defending his translation strategies to refute accusations that he had falsified the Holy Scriptures. His most celebrated passage is found in his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (1530):

With his translations, Luther was to provide a model for rendering the Bible in other vernaculars such as Dutch, Danish, Slovene and Finnish43 as well as the Swedish Gustav Vasa Bible.44 Like no other translator in the history of Europe, Martin Luther must be given the credit of having helped to develop a standard language through his translations, as scholars have emphasized even outside the German-speaking countries:

Through his translation of the Bible, Luther helped bring about the enrichment and standardization of the German lexicon, the development of a balanced syntax using formal means such as verb positions and conjunctions, as well as the capitalization of nouns. His main contribution, however, is in the field of stylistics. Clarity, general comprehensibility, simplicity and vividness were the most important stylistic features of his translation of the Bible, which even today serves as a model for good writing.45

Van den Vondel, the "Belles Infidèles", and Shakespeare in France

Not only vernaculars and standard languages were influenced in their development by translation, the same goes for the emergence of national literatures. An outstanding example is Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), the major poet, playwright and translator of the Dutch Golden Age, who can be regarded as a typical vernacular writer of the later Renaissance. Using the languages and models of Classical Antiquity, he created works and texts of a new literary culture. He was immensely productive both as a creative writer and as a translator, with impressive knowledge of various languages and cultures: He translated from Latin and Greek, but also from French and Italian. He also made two complete versions of Virgil, first in prose (1646) and then in verse (1660), encouraging others to do the same: Between 1650 and 1670, a number of Dutch versions of the Aeneid were published by other translators.46

The dominant country in European politics, scholarship and art of the 17th century was, however, France, and this also applied to translation. With the self-assertiveness typical of those in a position of power, French people thought that translations should conform to the rules, conventions and even the morals of their own literature. And so there arose the "belles infidèles", the free (infidèles or "unfaithful") translations that were pleasant to read (belles or "elegant"), and were hence target-oriented texts, which were dominant in France into the 18th century. The most important representative of this trend was Nicholas Perrot d'Ablancourt (1606–1664), who mainly translated historical texts, among others works by Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 55–116) and Cicero, which he "improved" as he saw fit. Top priority was given to elegance of expression and ease of style in the French target text, according to contemporary tastes. This tendency to "adaptation" continued well into the 18th century.47

One of the outstanding themes in the history of translation is the translation of the plays of Shakespeare. This truly European phenomenon spans the time from Classical Antiquity to the Elizabethan Renaissance and on to the German Romantics, thereby highlighting problems of language, literature and culture that arise when texts are rendered in different national languages.48 As mentioned above, Shakespeare must have been one of the readers of Thomas North's Plutarch's Lives, since he owes to them the material for his dramas Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. It is also interesting that a key role in the reception of Shakespeare's dramas on the European continent was played by France. There, drama was rediscovered during the 18th century as a literary and transcultural theatrical art form; and it was from France that the interest was to spread further:

Despite strong resistance at first, French translators assumed the role of initiators within their own country. In fact, the history of the translation of Shakespeare can be written as a history of the international dissemination of French versions of Shakespeare, which was later followed by resistance to French models, when the same fate befell translations as original compositions.49

In France there also developed a lively debate between two schools of thought: On the one hand, there were those who admired the new literary features in Shakespeare's plays, which they found lacking in French literature, and on the other, the defenders of French classicism who thought him "barbaric". In this context, two translators are significant: Pierre-Antoine de la Place (1707–1793), who between 1746 and 1749 published an eight-volume work entitled Le Théâtre anglais comprising free but uncontroversial translations, and in particular Pierre Le Tourneur (1736–1788), who translated Shakespeare's complete works:

The first volume of his twenty-volume Shakespeare, published between 1776 and 1783, contained a highly polemical preface in defence of Shakespeare, whose natural greatness, he claimed, had been obscured by previous "travesties". His translation was copiously annotated, and sought to "educate" rather than "please" the reader. Acknowledging the foreignness of the source text, to some extent at least, Le Tourneur also drew attention to the relativity of taste. In holding Shakespeare up as an alternative to French neoclassical literature, he inaugurated a critical tradition of which one of the famous examples is Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare (1823).51

Le Tourneur enjoyed considerable influence at the court of Louis XVI (1754–1793), and in France his translations had great success for almost fifty years.52 Internationally, French translations assumed a relay function53 and were used as source texts, especially in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.54 The predominance of French culture in the Age of Enlightenment even favoured such neoclassical "intermediate" texts, so that the reception of the original English texts only proceeded slowly and differed greatly from one culture to another – until the focus in the field of translation shifted from France to Germany.

One could point out that this article deals with the history of translation and not the history of translation theory.56 However, all the personalities named above were themselves translators; and their theoretical approaches were the fruits of their own labours, so to speak, or of their studies of the translations of their colleagues. In the context of the history of translation in Germany, it is hardly possible to make a clear separation between theory and practice. But the subject-matter is so intricate that the extensive debate on translation theory during the Enlightenment cannot be discussed here.

Of this epoch, during which translators in Germany worked with such eagerness and enthusiasm, only a few aspects can be highlighted here.57 The selection is based not only on the subject matter which we consider typical or basica. It is remarkable that that in contrast to the earlier Renaissance translators, most of whose names have been forgotten,58 most of the works translated in this age were penned by literary personalities who are still famous today, and for that reason alone deserve to be quoted here.

A major forerunner of this new interest in translation in the Romantic Age was undoubtedly Herder, whose enthusiasm for the diversity of languages and cultures found expression above all in his epoch-making collection of folk songs (Volkslieder, 1778–1779). In translation he no longer saw the compulsion to reproduce a given content according to definite rules, but rather the possibility of creating something new and different. Herder saw himself as an "Ohrenmensch" (a person oriented to sound), and the "tone", particularly in poetry, became for him the central notion with which he tried to understand a poem as a rhythmical form of expression. From then on, the translation of lyrical poetry meant perceiving and producing the "main tone".59 He explained this approach himself in the introduction to the second part of the Volkslieder:

Even if these few lines clearly show the enthusiasm for translating poetry, it is striking that in this period the most varied genres (although most of them are literary) from various epochs were translated – of course beginning with Classical Antiquity. A remarkable figure here is Johann Heinrich Voß (1751–1826), even if he adhered to the strict school of the Enlightenment rather than the new ideas of the young Romantics. He is especially well known for his translations of Homer, the Odüßee – or Odyssey – (1781)62 and the Ilias63, but he also translated Virgil (1789), Ovid (1798), and Horace (1806), as well as some plays by Shakespeare. However, the variety of translations of this age went far beyond the canon of the then well-known classics.64 Translating contemporary works was also popular, above all from France: Voltaire's Zaire (1740), for example, was published in 1776 in a new translation by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820), along with Kandide (1778) and his "sämmtliche Schriften" ("complete works").65Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712–1778)Nouvelle Héloise appeared in 1761 in a German version,66 and the autobiographical Confessions were published in 1782 as J.J. Rousseau's Bekenntnisse (Parts I and 2).67

"Nicht nur geographisch nimmt Spanien in Europa eine exzentrische Position ein"68 – it was precisely the Arab influence praised as the beginning of this article that was viewed with suspicion. Yet it was also "wegen des brutalen Aufbaus seines Imperiums durch eine als unbesiegbar geltende Armee" as well as because of the inquisition and other factors that the "schwarze Legende" (leyenda negra) of an unenlightened and unfree Spanish nation arose in other countries.69 Not until the last third of the 18th century were there signs of a turn for the better, and in the field of translation it was again Herder with his collection of folk songs who played a leading part. A major figure for translators was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), especially his Don Quixote, which appeared in 1780 in Leipzig in a six-volume version by Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822). The plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) were translated (among others) by the poet Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), but also by A.W. Schlegel (Spanisches Theater, 1803–1809),70 who presented his version of works from diverse Romance languages – Blumensträusse italiänischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie (1804)71 – leading us right into the intellectual centre of the German Romantic Age.

The range of translations produced in this age is vast, extending from the botanical research and classification of the Swedish scientist Carl von Linné (1707–1778)72 to the early feminist manifesto of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)A Vindication of the Rights of Woman73 and the above-mentioned Lives by Plutarch (translated by Gottlob Benedict von Schirach (1743–1804), which appeared in Berlin and Leipzig in 1777).74 However, it cannot be denied that the major focus of interest lies where we closed the preceding chapter: in translating the plays of Shakespeare.

That is what Herder wrote in 1773 in Von deutscher Art und Kunst,75 and for readers of today it must be surprising that fifty years earlier Shakespeare's plays had still been unknown in Germany. After caustic reviews by Gottsched and his contemporaries such as John Dryden (1631–1700), Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Voltaire, he had had a rather poor reputation as a "Naturdichter" ("nature poet"), "ohne Kenntnis der Regeln, ohne Gelehrsamkeit, ohne Ordnung",76 before translating Shakespeare achieved something like cult status: Here, too, Herder himself played a decisive role with his translation of Twelfth Night.

The great names connected with the early translations of Shakespeare in Germany are Johann Joachim Eschenburg and Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), who produced prose translations of twenty-two plays between 1762 and 1766. By far, the best known translations of Shakespeare are those made by A.W. Schlegel, who, along with Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), his daughter Dorothea Tieck (1799–1841) and Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin (1789–1878), translated all 36 plays into German: all in all, the "Schlegel-Tieck" translation was for a long time thought to be the "German Shakespeare" par excellence. Schlegel himself translated seventeen plays from 1797; the remaining nineteen were done between 1825 and 1833 with the collaboration of Ludwig Tieck, who worked as a dramaturge at the theatre in Dresden until 1842, Dorothea Tieck77 and Baudissin, who moved to Dresden in 1827.

The flourishing translation activity of the time unleashed a lively critical debate, particularly between the approach of the above-mentioned Johann Heinrich Voss, who strictly adhered to preserving the form of Classical hexameters, and the ideas of the younger Romantics. Goethe, himself an impassioned translator (his translations from French, English, Spanish and Italian, including the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571),78 fill an entire volume of his Collected Works), summarized the opinions in his commemorative address for Wieland in 1813 as follows:

In the same year, on 24th June 1813, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, himself a translator of Plato, delivered his famous address to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, in which he used almost the same words to describe the two "roads" open to the translator:

For the first epoch of "prosaic" translating, Goethe suggests Luther's Bible translation as an example; for the second, "parodistic" epoch, Wieland's translations or the French tradition; for the third – Schleiermacher's ideal of foreignizing – he names the translations of Homer by Voss. Goethe and the German Romantics did trigger a vigorous exchange of translations in Europe – the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), for example, translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1824) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1827) and wrote a Life of Schiller in 1823–1824,82 which appeared in German in 1830 with a preface by Goethe;83 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1843) translated Schiller's Wallenstein (1800), and conversely Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 1788–1824), Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were translated into German. Nevertheless, with his West-Östlicher Diwan Goethe added a further component; the fascination with the "Orient", which was evident in 19th century Europe. Originally, Goethe's work had been entitled "Versammlung deutscher Gedichte mit stetem Bezug auf den 'Diwan' (Liedersammlung) des persischen Sängers Mahomed Schemseddin Hafis" and was based on the Divanof Mohammed Shemmseddin Hafiz (ca. 1317/26–1389/90), which the Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1744-1856) published in 1812 "aus dem Persischen zum erstenmal ganz übersetzt".84 The 19th century, however, was also the heyday of colonialism, and the fascination for the "Orient" and hence translation in Europe was permeated by increasing arrogance towards the "foreign".

It is not surprising that striking examples of translations of this kind came from the motherland of the British Empire. Especially well known is the Englishman Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883) for his free translation from Persian of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859),85 about which he made the following comment:

It is an amusement to me to take what liberties I like with these Persians, who, (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them.86

Also well known for his translations, as well as for his expeditions round the world, is the orientalist Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), at first for his 16-volume edition of the Arabian Nights, but above all for Oriental erotic texts like the Kama Sutra (1883), which he published privately to avoid the risk of prosecution.87

An empire does not, however, live on literature alone, and it is remarkable that hardly any research has been carried out on non-literary translations by representatives of the colonial powers. In this field, the orientalist and jurist Sir William Jones (1746–1794) was extremely active, and from 1783 he utilized the translation of legal texts in India "to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning."88

Of more immediate interest here is the translatorial activity in a European complex of states, which did not consist of colonies but of "crown lands", namely the multi-ethnic, multilingual Habsburg monarchy. On this territory, a vast translation service existed, which, however, has only recently been discovered by researchers.89 And yet the "Orient" had been integrated here for centuries: Back in 1754, the Empress Maria Theresia (1717–1780) founded the "Oriental Academy",90 whose graduates gained proficiency in Turkish (sometimes also in Arabic and Persian) in order to work as "Oriental interpreters" in the Austrian "Internuntiatur" in Istanbul.91 In the Habsburg monarchy of the 19th century, translators were mostly concerned with text-books, legal works and legal regulations as well as jurisdiction and administration, "denn naturgemäß wurde im alten Österreich allenthalben Tag und Nacht übersetzt".92 In contrast to the literary translators of the German Romantic Age, these individuals are of course completely unknown today. Yet they bore, if they had been officially appointed, the distinguished title "Translator".93 It is only very recently as well that a detailed monograph on the abundant translatorial activity in the Habsburg monarchy from 1848 until its end in 1918 has been published.94 Some insight into the bureaucracy, but also into the linguistic diversity of the Austrian Empire, is provided in a compact study on Habsburg translators in the "Redaktionsbureau des Reichsgesetzblattes" ("Editorial Office of the Imperial Law Gazette").95 The Editorial Office was established in 1849 with a patent from the Emperor, and the Law Gazette was intended to appear "in zehn Ausgaben in den folgenden 'landesüblichen' Sprachen …:

At first the texts were declared equally valid in all ten languages.97 This, of course, meant a vast amount of work for the translators, with corresponding side-effects such as time-pressure, financial problems and constant changes in staff. In 1852, the German text was then declared the only authentic one, so that the Gazette from then on appeared in German only.98

Not only in the Habsburg Empire, a sense of discomfort at such "Germanization", above all to the detriment of the Slavonic languages, developed.99 The situation was especially alarming in Poland, because after the partition of 1795 it was not only the country that disappeared from the map until 1918. The Polish language itself was also suppressed by the Prussian, Austrian and Russian powers and gradually became a medium of resistance.100 Thus a problem arose which was to become a central issue in Europe (and in the meantime in the whole world): that of dominant and peripheral languages and their cultures.

In the course of the 19th and especially in the 20th century, colonial or imperial arrogance towards anything foreign developed into open xenophobia, accompanied by an increase in anti-Semitism. Of course translations were still produced in all fields, but the heyday was now over. However, there were occasional translatorial milestones, such as the new translation of the Bible by Martin Buber (1878–1865) and Franz Rosenzweig or the translation of Charles Baudelaire's (1821–1867)Tableaux parisiens (1923) by Walter Benjamin, whose preface "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" ("The Task of the Translator") takes Goethe's highest epoch of translation as its ideal and is still acclaimed world-wide in modern Translation Studies. Benjamin himself was driven to suicide by the catastrophe of the Nazi dictatorship.

For translation, fascism inevitably meant censorship and repression. Still, there was also active resistance, for example in Germany,101 Italy, and the Soviet Union.102 A real low point for the profession of translating and interpreting is described by Paul Schmidt, Chief Interpreter in the German Foreign Office during the Third Reich, when he compares the Language Service in Berlin at the beginning of the Second World War to a "lonely island in the midst of the metropolis":

Epilogue: After 1945 – The Path to Translation Studies

The economic role of translation can be seen in the Index Translationum, which has been kept up by the UNESCO since 1932104 and comprises a number of statistics on the book markets of the member states. After the Second World War, translation was to experience an unprecedented revival, with a central role being played by technology. What the invention of printing was for translation during the Renaissance was information technology (IT) in the second half of the 20th century. First attempts at machine translation (FAHQT: fully automatic high quality translation) in the USA105 may have been dismissed by the 1966 ALPAC106 Report as illusory, but the ensuing rapid progress in computer and information technologies as well as in telecommunication has changed the work of technical translators (LSP) for good; in particular through terminological data-banks and computer-aided translation (CAT). The development of audio-visual media led to new forms and techniques of translation, above all dubbing and subtitling for the screen. With the emergence and expansion of multilingual international organisations like the UNO and the EU, gigantic language services were created, whose basic problems do remind one of those of the Habsburg Empire. However, not German but English (in its reduced form as the lingua franca of a globalized world) is now the predominant language, also in Europe.

Nevertheless, literary translation too has increased world-wide, at least in quantity, and here again English (in diverse – (post)colonial – varieties, above all American English) is the dominant source or relay language. "Peripheral" or "smaller" languages like Slovene, Romanian, Czech, Finnish, Modern Greek or Polish usually function as target languages and even have to secure their identity and further existence partly through translation, so that in these language communities translation cultures are especially vibrant.

With this wealth of translation activity it is only natural that professional organizations have been founded on national and international levels, above all the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT), which was founded in 1953 in Paris by Pierre-Francois Caillé (1907–1979). With the increasing importance of LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) translation, university training schools for translators and interpreters were established, first mainly in the German- and French-speaking countries,107 but also in Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the UK and – at first with particular success – in Finland. With the increasing intensity of the critical and theoretical debates, especially during the 1980s, there emerged an independent discipline of translating and interpreting (Translation Studies), and the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) was founded in Vienna in 1992.

Meanwhile, Translation (and Interpreting) Studies has become an internationally recognized discipline, and the work of the translator, although it is still underrated, is more important than ever. Especially today, the famous words of the translator Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his letter to Thomas Carlyle of 20th July 1827 could serve as a model for all those concerned with translation:

Notes

^ The concept of translation used here goes back to the Leipzig scholar Otto Kade who in 1963 introduced the German generic term Translation for both Übersetzen (translation) and Dolmetschen (interpreting) and is understood as "die Translation eines fixierten und demzufolge permanent dargebotenen bzw. beliebig oft wiederholbaren Textes der Ausgangssprache in einen jederzeit kontrollierbaren und wiederholt korrigierbaren Text der Zielsprache" ("the rendering of a fixed source-language text permanently available in written form (as against the interpreter's rendering of discourse) in a target-language text which can be checked any time and can be repeatedly corrected", transl. by M.S.-H.; see Kade, Zufall und Gesetzmäßigkeit 1968, p. 35 and Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies 2006, p. 28).

^ The broadest basic distinction is between literal and free translation, as will be discussed below. In extreme cases, the target text preserves the grammatical and lexical structures of the source text so dogmatically that knowledge of the source language is required for the reader to be able to understand the target text, as for example the translations of the early Humanist Niklas von Wyle (Füssel, Gutenberg 1999, p. 61). At the other extreme, the translator can "transplant" the content into the target culture (see Vermeer, Übersetzen im Mittelalter 1996, fn. 12).

^ It is important to stress this, because methods and priorities naturally differ from one discipline to another.

^ Cf. Baker, Arabic Tradition 1998, p. 324. The Nestorian Hunayn ihn Ishaq Christianized heathen elements in his translations from Greek into Syriac or Arabic – an example of "ideological filtering" in translation (cf. König, Europa und sein arabisch-islamisches Erbe 2011, p.237). His scientific works include a Greek-Syriac dictionary and a handbook for translators from Greek into Arabic; he adopted a sense-for-sense approach in translating even at the level of entire sentences (cf. Gouguenheim, Aristoleles auf dem Mont Saint-Michel 2011, p. 78f.).

^ Research on the history of translation seems to have overlooked the fact that during the entire Middle Ages there were direct contacts to the Byzantine Empire, that Greek scholars lived and worked in areas dominated by Latin culture (e.g. in Rome and Sicily) and thus contributed towards promoting Greek knowledge. One of the most important translators of Aristotle in the 12th century was Jacobus Venetius Graecus (died between 1145 and 1150), known as Jacobus of Venice, whose translations were, however, greatly influenced by Greek (cf. Gouguenheim, 2011, pp. 86f., Vermeer, Das Übersetzen im Mittelalter 1996, p. 193). Wilhelm of Moerbeke (1215–1286), personal chaplain to the Pope, translated the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics of Aristotle into Latin; he also revised all translations of Aristotle made in Spain (cf. Gougenheim, Aristoteles auf dem Mont Saint-Michel 2011, p. 84).

^ A translator renowned for his commitment to the use of the Italian vernacular was Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), cf. Duranti. Italian Tradition 1998, p. 484; Vermeer, Das Übersetzen in Renaissance und Humanismus 2000, pp. 164ff. In Florence, the first official Chair of Greek Language and Literature was created in 1397 (Füssel, Gutenberg 1999, p. 50).

^ "I have translated both comedies and poem from Latin to German as well as I could, not word for word when this would have been incomprehensible, but according to the sense and meaning of the material when these are most fluent and easy to understand", transl. by M.S.-H. (cit. Klecha, Albrecht von Eyb 1989, p. 16). In his translations of Plautus (Bacchides and Menaechmi), Eyb takes his principles so far as to transpose Classical elements into his own time and surroundings: e.g. consul is rendered as Bürgermeister (see Vermeer, Das Übersetzen in Renaissance und Humanismus 2000, p. 575).

^ "For we had to observe how books containing the Order of the Holy Mass and other such works on divine matters and the chief issues of our religion were translated from the Latin into the German language and, not without shame for religion, go through the hands of the common folk. … Therefore we command that no works of whatever kind, whichever branch of scholarship, art or knowledge they concern, be translated from Greek, Latin or any other language into the German vernacular and furthermore that any translated works, whether public or clandestine, direct or indirect, must be examined by specially appointed masters and doctors of the University in our city of Mainz or similar scholars in our city of Erfurt before they are sent to print, or if already printed before they are distributed, and should be approved with a special seal for printing or distribution", transl. by M.S.-H. (cf. Füssel, Gutenberg 1999, p. 74).

^ The German translator Albrecht von Eyb had a similar intention since he, during the previous century, had translated Latin works into German prose explicitly for the "moral instruction" of his readers.

^ This translation was the work of fifty-four scholars commissioned by James I (1566–1625) and was not intended to be a totally new version but rather to preserve the best parts of already existing ones – among them the version by Tyndale (Delisle / Woodsworth, Translators Through History 1995, p. 175).

^ "We shouldn't go and ask the Latin text how to speak German, as those fools do, we must ask the housewives and children, the ordinary man in the street and listen to what they say and translate accordingly – then they'll understand and see we're talking proper German to them." (German text quoted in Störig, Das Problem des Übersetzens 1963, p. 21; for the English translation see Snell-Hornby, Translation Studies 1995, p. 9.)

^ Woodsworth, Geschichte des Übersetzens 1998, p. 42. The Finnish reformer and translator of the Bible Mikael Acricola (1510–1557) studied in Wittenberg from 1536 to 1539, graduating as Magister, and there he familiarized himself with the ideas of the Reformation (cf. Huhtala, Raamatunsuomennokset 2007, p. 49).

^ This was not diminished by other stage adaptations by Jean-François Ducis (1733–1816) and new models by Alfred de Vigny (1707–1863), in particular his Othello as a romantic tragedy (1829).

^ Relay translation is the term used when for example a work translated into English or French serves as the source text for a translation into a third language (e.g. German, Czech, Finnish). This occurs particularly with exotic and so-called "small" languages.

^ Cf. Delisle / Woodsworth, Translators Through History 1995, p. 77. This relay function was later assumed by other dominant languages such as German in the 19th century and today English.

^ An overview of the theoretical discussion of the period can be found in Sdun, Probleme und Theorien des Übersetzens 1967.

^ In 1982, there was a major exhibition in the Schiller National Museum in Marbach am Neckar on "Weltliteratur: Die Lust am Übersetzen im Jahrhundert Goethes" (World Literature: The Passion for Translating in the Age of Goethe) to mark the 150th anniversary of Goethe's death. The 700-page catalogue (Tgahrt, Weltliteratur 1982), with its countless documents, commentaries, anecdotes, excerpts from letters, citations, text-extracts and illustrations (portraits, facsimiles of manuscripts, theatre bills and correspondence) conveys an idea of the stupendous translation activity of this time. The term Weltliteratur, coined by Goethe but never precisely defined, means "nicht einfach nur die Summe nationaler Literaturen, sondern vielmehr deren Vermittlung und wechselseitige Anerkennung, zugleich eine Art höherer Einheit, in der große Dichtung verschiedenster Völker und Zeiten Aufnahme und neue Wirkungsmöglichkeiten finden kann" ("not simply the sum of national literatures, but rather their mediation and mutual recognition, at the same time a kind of higher unit in which great literature of the most different peoples and times can find reception and new opportunities to take effect", transl. by M.S.-H., Zeller, Vorwort, p. 7). The conclusions in the catalogue's preface could also apply for the years after 1945: "Nach furchtbaren Kriegsjahren habe sich das Bedürfnis nach 'nachbarlichen Verhältnissen' entwickelt und so sei auch der Geist, das heißt das Werk der Dichtung, in den 'freien geistigen Handelsverkehr mit aufgenommen'" ("After terrible years of war, there developed the need for 'neighbourly relations' and hence the spirit, that is the work of literature, can be 'taken up into the free trade of the mind'", transl. by. M.S.-H.), as Goethe wrote in 1830 in the Preface to Thomas Carlyle's Life of Schiller. Elsewhere we can read: "Wenn wir eine europäische, ja eine allgemeine Weltliteratur zu verkündigen gewagt haben, so heißt dieses … dass die lebendigen und strebenden Literaturen einander kennen lernen und durch Neigung und Gemeinsinn sich veranlasst finden, gesellschaftlich zu wirken. … Die Nationen sollen … einander gewahr werden, sich begreifen und, wenn sie sich wechselseitig nicht lieben mögen, sich einander wenigstens dulden lernen. … Weltliteratur wird über alles Literarische hinaus ein großes politisches Programm." ("If we have been so bold as to proclaim a European, even a general world literature, this means … that the living and aspiring literatures get to know each other and feel the need by inclination and public spirit to have an influence on society. … The nations should … grow aware of one another, understand each other and, if they cannot develop a mutual liking, they should at least learn to tolerate each other. … World literature will grow beyond all literary aspects into a great political programme" (transl. by M.S.-H., ibid, p. 7).

^ "It is the most difficult thing, in translating too, to render this tone, the singing tone of a foreign language, as is seen in a hundred failed songs and lyrical vehicles on the bank of our own and of foreign languages. … But all dithering between two languages and forms of song, both on the part of the author and the translator, is intolerable; the ear perceives it at once and hates the hobbling messenger who knows neither what to say nor how to keep silent", transl. by M.S.-H. (cf. ibid., p. 123).

^ "You have raised the art of rendering the most varied kinds of nature and folk poetry, each in its own tone and manner, to hitherto unscaled heights: I would be proud if my most attentive, frequently repeated study of all that you have given the world in this field could give me the claim to be called your disciple", transl. by M.S.-H. (cit. ibid., p. 132.)

^ "The boldest enemies of Shakespeare have accused and mocked him – in how many guises! – for not being a great dramatist, though he might be a great poet, and even if he is a great dramatist, then certainly not a Classical tragedian like Sophocles, Euripides, Corneille and Voltaire, who have scaled the great heights of this art. – And Shakespeare's boldest friends have contented themselves in coming to his defence, in trying to save him: in always only balancing the beauty of his work against his breaking the rules, in compensating: in trying to absolve him in the role of the accused and in idolizing his greatness all the more the greater the effort they had to make to excuse his faults", transl. by M.S.-H. (Herder, Von deutscher Art und Kunst 1773, p. 74, cit. Tgahrt, Weltliteratur 1982, p. 133).

^ "without knowledge of the rules, without erudition, without order", transl. by M.S.-H. (ibid., p. 575).

^ The part played by Dorothea Tieck in the translation of Shakespeare is interesting. She is described as her father's "most loyal helper". In a letter dated April 9, 1818, to Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck writes about his 19-year-old daughter: "Das liebe Kind …: sie liest gern und hat mit mir das Englische und Spanische getrieben, so dass ihr Shakespeare und Calderón im Original nicht unverständlich sind" ("That dear child …: she likes reading, and has been through English and Spanish with me, so that Shakespeare and Calderón in the originals are not incomprehensible to her", transl. by M.S.-H., ibid., p. 518f.).

^ "There are two maxims in translation: one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought across to us in such a way that we can look on him as ours; the other requires that we should go across to what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its use of language, it peculiarities. The advantages of both are sufficiently known to educated people through perfect examples. Our friend, who looked for the middle way in this, too, tried to reconcile both, but as a man of feeling and taste he preferred the first maxim when in doubt" (cit. ibid., p. 270 in German; the English translation is by Lefevere, Translating Literature 1977, p. 39).

^ "Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him, or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him" (cit. Störig, Das Problem des Übersetzens 1963, p. 47; English translation in Lefevere, Translating Literature 1977, p. 74.)

^ "The first acquaints us with foreign countries on our own terms; a simple prosaic translation is best in this respect. … A second epoch follows in which [the translator] really only tries to appropriate foreign content and to reproduce it in his own sense, even though he tries to transport himself into foreign situations. I would like to call this kind of epoch the parodistic one. … Since … one change must of necessity follow another, we experienced the third epoch, which is to be called the highest and the final one, namely the one in which the aim is to make the original identical with the translation, so that one would not be valued instead of the other, but in the other's stead" (for the complete version see Störig, Das Problems des Übersetzens 1963; English translation in Lefevere, Translating Literature 1977, pp. 35–36).

^ "Collection of German poems with constant reference to the 'Divan' (collection of songs) of the Persian singer Mahomed Shemseddin Hafiz"; "for the first time completely translated from Persian" (transl. by M.S.-H., ibid., p. 396).

^ "To appear in ten editions in the following languages of the Empire …: In German, in Italian, in Hungarian, in Bohemian (at the same time Moravian and Slovakian), in Polish, in Ruthenian, in Slovenian (at the same time Venetian and Carniolan written language), in Serbian-Illyrian with Serbian script, in Serbian-Illyrian (at the same time Croatian) with Latin letters, in Romanian (Moldavian)" (transl. by M.S.-H., ibid., p. 42).

^ This often led to a growing national awareness and at the same time to increasing translation activity into the local language. Cf. Kufnerova, Czech Tradition 1998, p. 379. See also Prunč, Hegemoniale und emanzipatorische Übersetzungsstrategien 2012.

^ "The telephones were disconnected, the entrances to the departments on all floors were guarded, and beneath the windows were the unobtrusive figures of the criminal police whose vigilant eyes made sure that the "island" really remained an island" (transl. by M.S.-H., cf. Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer Bühne 1968, p. 472; Snell-Hornby, Translationswissenschaft in Wendezeiten 2008, S. 44f.)

^ "And that is how we should view every translator, as someone who endeavours to mediate in this great intellectual commerce, making it his business to promote the interchange. For say what one will about the shortcomings of translation, it is and will remain one of the most important and most worthy concerns in the whole of world affairs" (transl. by M.S.-H., cit. Tgahrt, Weltliteratur 1982, p. 9).

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